ADATA S510 120GB Solid State Drive Review

1. Introduction2. ADATA S510 120GB Solid State Drive3. ADATA S510 120GB Solid State Drive (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. CrystalDiskMark6. ATTO Disk Benchmark7. AS SSD8. PCMark 79. IOMeter10. Real World Testing11. Closing Thoughts12. View All Pages

Today we are looking at a new solid state drive from ADATA – the S510 120GB. This drive is being marketed as their ‘budget friendly' offering, with a UK retail price of only £119.99 inc vat, available on pre-order from Overclockers UK. It is based around the excellent Sandforce SF 2281 series controller with rated speeds of up to 550 MB/s read and 510 MB/s write. Should this be making your shortlist for a new drive?

ADATA might not be seen as a big player in the SSD market, but they have been prominent in the enterprise memory sector now for many years. Their S511 series has been reviewed before at Kitguru and was one of the performance leaders for many months and the S510 is set to target a more budget conscious audience.

The 120GB S510 is £40 cheaper than the 120GB S511, so the savings are noticeable.

Specifications:

• Capacity: 120GB
• Read: Up to 550MB/S
• Write: Up to 510MB/S
• Seq Read: Up to 200MB/S
• Seq Write: Up to 140MB/S
• 4K Random Write (Aligned): 60,000 IOPS
• Maximum 4K Random Write: 85,000 IOPS
• Sandforce SF-2281

The ADATA S510 120GB arrives in a traditionally designed box, featuring the ADATA bird logo and drive specifications.

Inside is a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter, painted in ADATA colours. There are also some mounting screws and two leaflets, one of which contains the download information for the free OEM version of ACRONIS True Image software.

The ADATA S510 120GB drive is supplied in a black chassis with a blue sticker on front highlighting the specifications and name. The rear of the drive has all the information on the unit, including the serial number for the free copy of the ACRONIS software. We have deliberately blanked out the serial on this drive for security reasons.

The ADATA S510 drive is using Micron 29F64G08CBAAA flash 25nm memory which we have seen used in other drives recently, including the Corsair Force Series 3 drives. The Sandforce 2281 controller can access eight separate NAND channels, and two NAND modules are placed on each channel. The controller is marked as ‘SF-2281VB1-SDC’. ADATA rate this drive with read and write performance at 550 MB/s and 510 MB/s respectively. Sequential read and write is rated at 200 MB/s and 140 MB/s respectively.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Main system:

CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410

Other Drives (used in Core i7 2600k system above):
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Pyro SE 240GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

PCIe drives test system:

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD &
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Test System:
CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz
Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition
Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Nvidia GTX580
Chassis: Lian Li X2000F
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
CrystalMark
AS SSD
PCMark 7
IOMeter
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64.

Overall performance of the drive with incompressible data is slightly underwhelming when compared against more expensive counterpart products.

When we enable the alternative ‘compressible’ setting called ’0×00 fill’ the performance increases dramatically, averaging around 465 MB/s seq read and 476 MB/s seq write. Huge increases from the previous results. 4k QD32 write performance also shows huge gains, alongside read and write 512k performance.

Performance against the leading drives is actually very competitive in compressible data mode. Not quite at the same level as the top drives, but reasonably close.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Performance results are very positive, scoring slightly more than the Patriot Pyro 120GB.

Above, some comparison results from other competing products.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

AS SSD works with incompressible data, meaning the ADATA drive suffers with overall scoring.

Above, some comparison results from other leading solid state drives.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The ADATA drive scores well in PCMark 7, showing good all round performance with this synthetic test suite.

IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We use a custom Kitguru configuration for 4k random write to measure performance.

ADATA rate the drive as capable of up to 85,000 IOPS with their own 4k Random write test, but with our settings it achieved 66,491 IOPS, which is actually a very good result.

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.

23 seconds is pretty much what we would have expected from the drive, a very strong results, especially considering the budget price point.

STALKER: Call of Pripyat uses mainly compressible data, which means the S510 is able to perform at a similar level to the Wildfire 120GB, registering a score of 18 seconds.

There is no doubt that OCZ technologies rule the SSD market right now, however the competition in recent months has certainly been heating up for them. Patriot for instance have been unleashing some fantastic performance oriented Solid State Drives, such as the Wildfire, and lately the Pyro SE. The competition is no less fierce in the budget sector with many companies continually driving down prices and increasing capacity.

The ADATA S510 120GB is firmly planted in the budget, price conscious sector and it serves a heady dose of performance for the modest asking price. Overclockers have the drive stocked for £119.99 inc vat, which means it is one of the lowest priced Sandforce 2281 powered 120GB drives on the market today.

In regards to overall bandwidth, the drive does suffers when dealing with incompressible data, with performance dropping significantly. In real world terms however, the majority of applications use compressible data, so performance is pretty much on a par with higher priced drives. We do advise caution however if incompressible data performance is a primary concern.

The bundle is surprisingly comprehensive, as ADATA include a useful 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch adapter in metallic blue, and the code for a personalised download of Acronis True Image. This software will allow for a complete mirror copy of a boot drive, which can then be simply replaced without any headaches. We use this software regularly and really rate it highly.

Pros:

• Extremely competitive price point.
• Strong bundle, including Acronis True Image.
• IOPS performance is excellent.

Cons:

• Incompressible data performance.

Kitguru says: The ADATA S510 120GB is one of  the best value for money SSD’s on the market today.

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